Shakuntala and Somanatha

2017 ◽  
pp. 281-326
Author(s):  
Ramin Jahanbegloo ◽  
Romila Thapar ◽  
Neeladri Bhattacharya

In this section there is a discussion on two books written by Thapar, Shakuntala and Somanatha. She explains what made her choose these two subjects which, in a sense, suggest both a similar and yet a somewhat dissimilar narrative strategy. The story of Shakuntala is fictional yet it is a story that is frequently rewritten in history but incorporating some small changes. Thapar relates the changes in the drama to their historical context. She also shows how the projection of the central character in the story alters over time and is perceived differently both across time and by recourse to different cultural attributes. Her book on Somanatha takes the central historical event and examines how it is viewed in a variety of sources from variant perspectives. Some describe it in different ways whereas others do not refer to it despite writing about other events at Somanatha. The methods encapsulated in both these books are suggestive of new ways of looking at the past. This can also be seen in Thapar’s substantial work on how people in the past looked at their own past and how this illumines our understanding of that past.

Author(s):  
Naomi Leite

This chapter pursues two interrelated aims. The first is to track the complex social category of being Jewish in Portugal across centuries, teasing apart its various meanings and subcategories over time. For to be “Jewish” in Portugal is no straightforward matter: while the social category “Jews” (judeus) has existed in Portuguese society for well over a millennium, its meaning has varied continuously over the past five hundred years. In addition, the chapter aims to provide the broad historical context—as recorded by historians and as remembered by diverse stakeholders in the present—for the emergence and rapid growth of urban Marrano associations in the late 1990s and 2000s.


Author(s):  
Abbie E. Goldberg

The prologue provides historical context for the book, detailing, for example, how adoption has changed over time, particularly with regard to structural openness (i.e., contact between birth and adoptive families) and communicative openness in adoption (i.e., how parents talk about adoption), two key concepts in the book. In addition to changes in openness, other major societal shifts have occurred over the past several decades that impact and intersect with adoption: namely, the rise in gay parenthood and the rise and expansion of the Internet in society. The prologue also introduces the research participants who were interviewed for the book: namely, lesbian, gay, and heterosexual couples who adopted through private domestic adoption or foster care, and who were interviewed at various points from preadoption to 8 years after they adopted. The prologue also addresses the major theoretical perspectives (family systems, life course, developmental) that frame the book.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-256
Author(s):  
Arkady Kovelman ◽  
Uri Gershowitz

Abstract To solve the aporia of suffering and evil, the framers of Bavli Berakhot as well as Augustine combined the idea of love for God with the notion of making the moment linger. According to Augustine, evil prevents man from praising God. Evil derives from perverted human will and poisons a soul. Instead of being distended between the past and the future, a soul should forget the past, concentrate on the present, and extend the present as much as possible. By concentration, the present can be extended to approximate eternity, which is the messianic future. The idea of making a moment linger is salient in Bavli Berkahot as well. The close correlation between redemption and ritual presumes the lingering of time, achieved by prolonging the recitation, concentrating on the text, and merging the blessings. Prolonging halakhic time at any cost hastens the coming of the ultimate meta-historical event. Thus Aqiba’s protracting of the word ehad brings him into a meta-historical context, into the future world. The moment of reading the word ehad lingers amidst torture, spasm, and ecstasy. That ecstasy is the consummation of love with God.


Author(s):  
Corey Kai Nelson Schultz

This book examines how the films of the Chinese Sixth Generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke evoke the affective “felt” experience of China’s contemporary social and economic transformations, by examining the class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual, and entrepreneur that are found in the films. Each chapter analyzes a figure’s socio-historical context, its filmic representation, and its recurring cinematic tropes in order to understand how they create what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling” – feelings that concretize around particular times, places, generations, and classes that are captured and evoked in art – and charts how this felt experience has changed over the past forty years of China’s economic reforms. The book argues that that Jia’s cinema should be understood not just as narratives that represent Chinese social change, but also as an effort to engage the audience’s emotional responses during this period of China’s massive and fast-paced transformation.


Author(s):  
Telesca Giuseppe

The ambition of this book is to combine different bodies of scholarship that in the past have been interested in (1) providing social/structural analysis of financial elites, (2) measuring their influence, or (3) exploring their degree of persistence/circulation. The final goal of the volume is to investigate the adjustment of financial elites to institutional change, and to assess financial elites’ contribution to institutional change. To reach this goal, the nine chapters of the book introduced here look at financial elites’ role in different European societies and markets over time, and provide historical comparisons and country and cross-country analysis of their adaptation and contribution to the transformation of the national and international regulatory/cultural context in the wake of a crisis or in a longer term perspective.


Author(s):  
C. Michael Shea

For the past several decades, scholars have stressed that the genius of John Henry Newman remained underappreciated among his Roman Catholic contemporaries, and in order to find the true impact of his work, one must look to the century after his death. This book takes direct aim at that assumption. Examining a host of overlooked evidence from England and the European continent, Newman’s Early Legacy tracks letters, recorded conversations, and obscure and unpublished theological exchanges to show how Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine influenced a cadre of Catholic teachers, writers, and Church authorities in nineteenth-century Rome. The book explores how these individuals then employed Newman’s theory of development to argue for the definability of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary during the years preceding the doctrine’s promulgation in 1854. Through numerous twists and turns, the narrative traces how the theory of development became a factor in determining the very language that the Roman Catholic Church would use in referring to doctrinal change over time. In this way, Newman’s Early Legacy uncovers a key dimension of Newman’s significance in modern religious history.


Author(s):  
Stephanie Downes ◽  
Sally Holloway ◽  
Sarah Randles
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  

This book is about the ways in which humans have been bound affectively to the material world in and over time; how they have made, commissioned, and used objects to facilitate their emotional lives; how they felt about their things; and the ways certain things from the past continue to make people feel today. The temporal and geographical focus of ...


Anticorruption in History is the first major collection of case studies on how past societies and polities, in and beyond Europe, defined legitimate power in terms of fighting corruption and designed specific mechanisms to pursue that agenda. It is a timely book: corruption is widely seen today as a major problem, undermining trust in government, financial institutions, economic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellbeing in general. Corruption, in short, is a major hurdle on the “path to Denmark”—a feted blueprint for stable and successful statebuilding. The resonance of this view explains why efforts to promote anticorruption policies have proliferated in recent years. But while the subjects of corruption and anticorruption have captured the attention of politicians, scholars, NGOs and the global media, scant attention has been paid to the link between corruption and the change of anticorruption policies over time and place. Such a historical approach could help explain major moments of change in the past as well as reasons for the success and failure of specific anticorruption policies and their relation to a country’s image (of itself or as construed from outside) as being more or less corrupt. It is precisely this scholarly lacuna that the present volume intends to begin to fill. A wide range of historical contexts are addressed, ranging from the ancient to the modern period, with specific insights for policy makers offered throughout.


2021 ◽  
pp. 105971232110008
Author(s):  
John Sutton
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  

Rather than conserving or ignoring historically burdened heritage, RAAAF intervene. Their responses are striking, sometimes dramatic or destructive. Prompted by Rietveld’s discussion of the Luftschloss project, I compare some other places with difficult pasts which engage our embodied and sensory responses, without such active redirection or disruption. Ross Gibson’s concept of a ‘memoryscope’ helps us identify distinct but complementary ways of focussing the forces of the past. Emotions and imaginings are transmitted over time in many forms. The past is not easily washed, blasted or sliced away. By considering other settings and modes of encounter, we can recognise and applaud the novelty of RAAAF’s interventions while urging further attention to the variable dynamics and rhythms of remembering and of sociomaterial residues.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 315
Author(s):  
Malte Schäfer ◽  
Manuel Löwer

With the intent of summing up the past research on ecodesign and making it more accessible, we gather findings from 106 existing review articles in this field. Five research questions on terminology, evolution, barriers and success factors, methods and tools, and synergies, guide the clustering of the resulting 608 statements extracted from the reference. The quantitative analysis reveals that the number of review articles has been increasing over time. Furthermore, most statements originate from Europe, are published in journals, and address barriers and success factors. For the qualitative analysis, the findings are grouped according to the research question they address. We find that several names for similar concepts exist, with ecodesign being the most popular one. It has evolved from “end-of-pipe” pollution prevention to a more systemic concept, and addresses the complete life cycle. Barriers and success factors extend beyond the product development team to management, customers, policymakers, and educators. The number of ecodesign methods and tools available to address them is large, and more reviewing, testing, validation, and categorization of the existing ones is necessary. Synergies between ecodesign and other research disciplines exist in theory, but require implementation and testing in practice.


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